The Devil Is Captured and Put in Prison

Miguel Angel Travino Morales – AP

An amazing event has occurred in US-Mexican efforts to curb violence in northern Mexico – Miguel Angel Treviño Morales was finally captured in Nuevo Laredo by Mexican Marines, Monday morning near the US border while driving with two lieutenants, marking a “major blow to a crime gang with tentacles deep within the United States.” (Tim Johnson, McClatchy Newspapers, July 16, 2013)

Tim Johnson, working for a newspaper syndicate, might not have been able to give voice to what we’re all thinking, but I have no such reservations – THE DEVIL WAS CAPTURED AND PUT IN PRISON THIS WEEK! Surely if Satan wanted to live within the body of a man it would be Morales. His gang, the Zetas (literally, “The Zs”) has terrorized Mexico for years using beheadings, mass killings, and brutal tactics to expand their empire and push out rival gangs from areas they want to control. Their modus operandi included extortion, kidnapping, migrant smuggling and trafficking in cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamine. To say they had a profound affect on crime in the US and Mexico is to put it very mildly. Out of Mexico’s 31 states, The Zees “control” 11, whatever that means.

To lead a group like that takes a man even more evil, vile, and debase than the group itself; and that man was Morales. “A stocky man, Trevino has a reputation for grotesque savagery, even stuffing his enemies into drums and burning them alive or disemboweling them.” (Johnson) This preferred tactic of his was called the “guiso” or stew. The Zees “authored some of the worst atrocities of Mexico’s drug war, leaving hundreds of bodies beheaded on roadsides or hanging from bridges, earning a reputation as perhaps the most terrifying of the country’s numerous ruthless cartels.” (CBS News Daily Blotter, July 16, 2013) In the northern Mexican town of San Fernando, 193 bodies of migrants captured on their way into the US were found buried in a mass grave, killed by the Zees for various reasons that included refusal to carry drugs into the US.

During his brief leadership of the Zees, hundreds of pounds of drugs, money, and weapons flowed through the Mexican border every week. While that is unlikely to be disrupted for long (other cartels are vying to control Nuevo Laredo even now), at least it has been disrupted for a time. Meanwhile, Morales has been charged with murder, torture, kidnapping, and other crimes. It gives Northern Mexico a brief respite – the devil has been removed and incarcerated. I for one hope he rots there.